Janil Puthucheary on secure and reliable Government web services and data

Prior to the power outage at Microsoft Azure on Feb 8 this year, Government-procured cloud service providers had been able to meet the requirements to be available at least 99.9 per cent of the time. Senior Minister of State for Communications and Information Janil Puthucheary said this in Parliament on Wednesday (Feb 22), in reply to an MP's questions. He said the recent degradation of the Microsoft data centre had limited impact on Government services, adding that GovTech has been working with Microsoft to fully restore affected services and to prevent similar occurrences. He added that outages and disruptions can happen to any digital service including those hosted on the cloud services, but cloud service providers procured by the Government must meet its criteria for availability, resilience and security.